Abstract: In this paper we describe a project whose
principle aim was to “amplify” the engagement and stewardship of local
residents in the development and care of Soundview Park, in New York City. The project
Amplify Soundview was conducted as a core studio course within Parsons
Transdisciplinary Design MFA Program in Fall 2012 in collaboration with New
York City’s Partnerships for Parks. The project integrated the Open Locast U
platform (created by the MIT Mobile Experience Lab) into four proposals for
Soundview Park, developed by Parsons students’ teams. Through the narratives of
our students and project partners this paper will describe and reflect upon both
analogue and digital tools for civic engagement. In particular, these narratives
consider how digital tools such as Locast have the potential to engage the
public in a process of asset realization and articulation within an otherwise
disadvantaged urban context.

Using a qualitative auto-ethnographic approach (Ellis & Bochner, 2000) grounded in action
research (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2005; Reason & Bradbury, 2007) this paper will
describe and reflect upon the use of the Locast Platform in the context of the
project and course Amplify Soundview through the auto-ethnographic (Reason & Bradbury, 2007) narratives of
our students and community partners. The basic premise of the Amplify Soundview
project was that community-driven social innovation can be an engine for a
sustainable urban life, and that it can be amplified through design.

City Parks Foundation (CPF) through Partnerships for Parks
(PFP) — its joint public/private partnership with the New York City Department
of Parks & Recreation (DPR) — established the Catalyst Program, dedicated
to promoting community stewardship of the waterfront at several sites, including
Soundview Park in the Bronx, New York City.

Partnerships for Parks proposed to Parsons DESIS Lab to
apply the previously tested Amplify approach into Soundview Park. The Amplify
approach was originally defined in a 2009-2011 project “Amplifying Creative
Communities” by Parsons DESIS Lab funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s NYC
Cultural Innovation Fund 2009[1].
Amplify Soundview was therefore a spinoff initiative of this previous project.

Located on the Long Island Sound in the Bronx, Soundview
Park, with its past as a landfill and still deemed an unsafe area, has yet to
become a popular destination for the Soundview community. Currently, around
Soundview Park, there is little local recognition of the Long Island Sound as a
resource, minimal access to the water, and limited access to private philanthropy
or the city and state budget to tap into funds that could improve the
waterfront. The Bronx as a whole is usually considered an underserved area in
the city.

In partnership with the Catalyst Program team, Parsons DESIS
Lab launched the course ”Amplify Soundview” within the Parsons Transdiciplinary
Design MFA program in the Fall of 2012 to work with students to find ways to
amplify the resident’s engagement and stewardship in the development and care
of Soundview Park.

The course’s theoretical and methodological frameworks were
structured around principles of Action-Research[2] involving user research probes (Gaver, Dunne, & Pacenti, 1999), and other user testing activities; Service
Design, using tools such as user journeys and blueprints; Social Innovation and
Sustainability, bringing the idea in particular of bottom-up community-led
urban participation; and Emerging Digital Technologies, with the use of Locast as
a digital platform that can facilitate citizen engagement in the transformation
of urban life.

This paper will describe four different proposals developed
by design students and reflect upon the use of digital tools to engage the
public in a process of asset realization and articulation within an otherwise
disadvantaged urban context. In particular, the paper will reflect upon the
potentialities of Locast as a digital tool for citizen engagement. Each
proposal looked at four specific aspects of the park: Accessibility and mobility,
Peer networks and resources, the community group Friends of Soundview, and the Waterfront.

The aimof this paper is therefore to comparatively
consider the use of the analogue versus digital tools and processes used by the
students within their projects as enabling mechanisms for community engagement.
In addition, we also aim at reflecting on the pedagogical aspects of this
project. For that, we will discuss the premises and benefits of the project
scope and methods used in the course as an approach to service design learning.

The paper is structured through a sequence of narratives
coming from the different participants of the project, namely faculty, students
and project partners. Each of which have specific contributing sections.

While the project was concluded in Fall 2012, the project
partner Partnerships for Parks selected one of the projects developed by a
students’ team for pilot development in Spring 2013 (phase 3). This paper
however will focus solely on the Fall 2012 period (phases 1 and 2) (see Figure 1).

Project Structure and Thematic Frameworks

The project was organized in three phases. It started with a
research phase of seven weeks to identify community requirements
and generate initial service ideas. The main milestone was the event “It’s My
Park Day” organized as a Mobile Lab at the park to conduct early probing
of research findings and design ideas.

The Locast platform was introduced early on to students. MIT
Mobile Experience Lab director demonstrated to Parsons students how Locast could
be used as a civic journalism tool, a repository of communities’ cultural
heritage, a tool for conscious tourism among others. These were functional
modalities related to previous uses of the platform in different contexts.

The second phase focused on prototyping and testing and last
the remaining seven weeks of the academic semester and concluded with a
presentation for Partnerships for Parks. Given the complexity of the project, the
possibilities for incorporating Locast in the students’ projects became clearer
only in the second phase. There were several iterations and user-tests with
community partners along the second phase. The results of this phase are described
in the following section Student Narratives.

Figure 1. Project timeline

The project third phase happened in Spring 2013, after the
course was concluded. On it, one of the students’ projects was selected for
further development and testing for pilot implementation[3].
Results of this phase are not included in this paper.

Before the course started in Fall 2012, Partnerships for
Parks had already established their presence in Soundview Park and surrounding
community. Through their consistent community engagement, Partnerships for
Parks was able to capture the main issues at stake in the park, i.e. the main
aspects that needed to be addressed if we were to propose ways to increase
community involvement and stewardship of the park. These main aspects were
synthesized as four themes that were presented as project briefs for Parsons’
students, as follows:

Theme 01: Accessibility & Mobility. What are the
barriers (e.g. physical, psychological, etc.) that prevent access to the
Soundview Park and the development of the community as a whole?

Theme 02: Peer Networks & Resources. How can we enable
the Soundview residents to share resources, provide peer support and links to
needed resources? How the park can become a platform for community engagement?

Theme 03: Friends of Soundview Park[4].
What is the identity of the Soundview? How the history of the Soundview
neighborhood and the personal stories of Soundview residents can reinforce each
other identities? How a park like Soundview can help the community to develop a
sense of belonging, identity, shared beliefs and values?

Theme 04: Waterfront. How can access to the Soundview
waterfront be facilitated? How the connection between Soundview residents and
the waterfront can be strengthened in order to increase the community’s
environmental consciousness?

Along the semester the themes/design briefs evolved, each
team interpreting the initial briefs as they researched and tested ideas. In
the first research phase, students visit the park and surrounding neighborhood
and conducted initial contextual research. They also worked closely with
Partnerships for Parks staff to understand users and learn about previous
experiences.

The transition between phases one and two took
place during “It’s My Park Day”, a public event planned by Partnerships
for Parks, on which students could test their early
hypotheses through the use of engagement tools & prototypes. Parsons
faculty worked with research assistants and Partnerships for Parks in the
design and orchestration of the event. Four tents were set up in one of park
main entrances following a layout conducive to public participation. Students designed
probes and participatory activities to both test out early ideas or design
directions as well as gather more insight on users’ needs. The students’
projects were further developed and tested out with specific groups of users,
evolving into four final projects described in the subsequent narrative section.
Each team describes their final project and illustrates the significance of a
direct community engagement event in the development of their project
ambitions.

Student Narratives

“Make Your Mark Campaign” (MYMC) is a program designed by
Transdisciplinary Design MFA students at Parsons The New School for Design in
conjunction with the Partnerships for Parks in New York City. The campaign is
an agile and scalable youth leadership and mentoring program that incentivizes
stewardship in parks that have affiliate groups that do work in the adjacent
communities of Soundview Park. MYMC 's goal is to empower youth by giving voice
to young people in an environment full of possibility. A park is a place where
imagination is welcome - so is the “It's My Park Day” Campaign.

MYMC integrates the Open Locast U platform as part of the
application process for youth-led projects, but also as a means of documenting
the work of young people involved in the program. Meant as an after-school
and/or summer program, the project aims at leveraging existing summer curricula
by using Locast and a competition-style incentive to teach skills through
experiential learning around stewardship, leadership, and media technology.

With modifications that configure Locast into our webportal
and integrate our campaign's visual language, a seamless user experience may be
possible. Using the contemporary norm of social media membership, Locast will
help young people involved in our program disseminate their efforts in the
campaign. This should allow for greater breadth of outreach for the work and a
deeper recognition of the value of young people's capacity to lead our
communities.

Built around the idea of a potluck, “Taste Sound View” program
aims at leveraging a social gathering around food as a catalyst to ignite
community conversation towards aligning interests, facilitating networks, and
revealing available resources. The project aims to amplify the involvement of
the local Soundview community in the stewardship of their park and to provide
the Friends of Soundview with tools that can be used to transform the park into
a platform for community engagement. We developed a toolkit aiming at empowering
the Friends of Soundview Park community group with the means to initiate
scalable opportunities for community intervention while inspiring projects that
create and sustain a positive social change.

Our team promoted a prototype event on which common
interests were unearthed and connections grew organically. The platform we
created worked well to promote community-based ideas and inspire further
action. While this analogic toolkit successfully ignited the spark, it seems
imperative that a sustained digital platform is available to distribute and
archive information while maintaining these new networks and relationships.

In this regard, the potential for Locast is clear. Ideally,
all of the relevant details for projects in the “Taste Sound View” program
would be accessible from this site. Collaborators, event calendars, photo/video
documentation, and resource information would all be visible and easily
navigated by participants and interested community members. In this scenario,
other social platforms such as WordPress and Twitter could serve as public
windows into the “Taste Sound View” Locast page. In every circumstance, the Locast
Platform must be able to interface with the various social media platforms that
are uniquely familiar to each user but Locast’s real success may be its ability
to act as a hub for project information.

Figure 3. “Taste Soundview” pilot potluck event at Soundview Park

Theme 03: Friends of Soundview
Project Title: “Tales of _______”

“Tales of _______” is a set of instructables for
storytelling activities that allow residents of the Soundview community to work
together in the creation of a park's identity. The goal of these instructables
is to amplify the intangible qualities of the park.

The stories that result from these instructables can be
manifested in anything from handmade paper puppets to simple animations, to
slideshows with narrative audio. No matter the medium, “Tales of ______”
produces a series of amusing and imaginative tales about a place.

Locast enables these stories to be collected, shared, and
distributed among the Soundview community. In places like Soundview Park that
are scarred with a negative history, the use of Locast allows these stories to
become part of a larger community than the room in which they were created. It
allows a large audience to create associations with place that are less based
on rumor and fear, but rather fun and imagination.

The project brief was to engage the Soundview community with
the waterfront at their nearby park, where the Bronx River meets the Long
Island Sound. We partnered with a local public high school, Bronx Compass, and
created “Thematic Trail Maps,” using a playful analog map-making toolkit
deployed in Soundview Park, entering the acquired data via a Locast interface
accessed in their classroom.

The Bronx Compass high school students were highly engaged
with the analog toolkit and equally enthusiastic to translate their experience
digitally. The phases of the activity were seamless, from classroom discussion
of waterways and ecological consciousness, to a class trip to experience the
park in all its potential, to bringing their experiences back to the realm of
information technology, an aspect of the school’s curriculum.

Even if during the development phase, the team did not
distribute the digital maps generated by Locast to a larger audience, the
hypothesis is that this step would integrate well and enhance the high school students’
overall learning experience. Communicating and sharing their new perspective on
the park and its waterfront with a larger community of friends and family
through Locast has realistic potential to bring a greater sense of engagement,
and stewardship, to the residents of Soundview.

Figure 5. “Thematic Trail Maps for Bronx Compass school” (top) pilot map use at the
Soundview Park with students of Compass school (bottom)

Partner Narrative: Partnership for Parks

Partnerships for Parks is a joint program of the City Parks
Foundation and the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation which helps New
Yorkers work together to make neighborhood parks thrive. Partnerships for Parks
works to start, strengthen, and support neighborhood park groups; to link them
together, so they can learn from each other and be stronger collectively; and
to promote parks in general, so people will join in efforts to restore and
preserve them. The Catalyst program is a multi-year initiative that works
in historically under-served neighborhoods to galvanize support for and
commitments for community building and improved parks. The current focus of the
program is on “Reclaiming Waterfront Parks” with communities near East
River Park in Manhattan, Kaiser and Calvert Vaux Parks in Brooklyn, and
Soundview Park in the Bronx.

Although this was their first time working with an outside
consultant, the Soundview community partners were receptive to the public
participation activities and the design services proposed as part of the Amplify
Soundview project. The goals of Amplify
Soundview were to design activities and services which could be easily used by
the local partners and which could further the groups’ goals of fostering
increased engagement and stewardship in the development and care of Soundview
Park. In the case of the project “Taste Sound View”, a set of web-based tools
and activities were developed which allowed long-term partners and potential
new partners to share resources and make connections through a series of
user-friendly charettes which took the form of community potlucks. The groups
are following-up on the success of the potlucks and the ensuing conversation
and as a result the Friends of Soundview Park and other collaborators are pursuing
funding for community projects, such as the butterfly and memorial garden.[6]

Additionally, the Catalyst Program has selected the project “Make
Your Mark Campaign” (MYMC) to be piloted. The intent is
to refine the existing curricula — designed for Soundview Park — and create a
program that can be replicated in any New York City park or any youth user
group.[7]

Educator Narrative: MFA Transdisciplinary Design

Critical to the development of the course, was the coordination between Parsons and the Catalyst Program, and
the role the later played in bringing students and community partners together.
The service design approach was essential to structure the teams’ project
development. In particular, it was essential to consider community interactions as experiences that evolved over time, resulting
in ever-evolving projects, in other words, the projects are considered
processes rather than final static outcomes (Kimbell, 2011; Meroni & Sangiorgi, 2011). To enable these processes, the use of tangible artifacts and
evocative engagement tools[8] are critical (Stickdorn & Schneider, 2010; Turkle, S., 2011).

The success of the action research approach could be largely
attributed to the nature of the interactions between students and project
partners including community leaders, based on designed situations such as the,
“Its’ My Park Day” event, that proved conducive to achieving collaborative participation.
(Smith and MacGregor, 1992; Innes & Booher, 2004).

Figure 6. “It’s My Park Day” event

Figure 7. At the “It’s My Park Day” event, the
Accessibility and Mobility team used probes such as badges with roles and
costumes (champion belts, star glasses, knight swords, etc.) to test out the
idea of young people getting involved in the park by playing specific roles

Collaborative participation proved essential to evolving
subsequent analogue/non-digital collaborative interactions such as the potluck
of “Taste of Soundview” project and the writing workshop of “Tales of _______” project,
where the teams developed and ran additional community engaged activities.

Locast was introduced as the digital platform within later
interactions (in the second phase), and therefore its use by the community has
been only envisioned and simulated rather than tested. There is evidence of the
potentialities of some specific users of Locast in some projects, such as the
project “Thematic Trail Maps for Bronx Compass school” where Compass students
manifested excitement in getting engaged with an online mapping tool.

Exploring how Locast could be embedded both technically - as
demonstrated by an embedded map within the project website within the “Make
Your Mark Campaign” as well as programmatically — as demonstrated in the “Thematic
Trail Maps for Bronx Compass School” project — proved pivotal in understanding
how Locast could be used as a tool rather than a destination or site.

Furthermore, by situating Locast within an existing site and/or
curriculum, implementers could leverage Locast’s key strengths and remedy the
more complex aspects of interfacing with a broad community in offline spaces.

Finally, we identified that Locast can be leveraged as a
tool for project leaders (including Parsons faculty and project partners) prior
to the community engagement activity taking place. It offers a useful set of features
including functioning as a repository of local content as well as capturing
process narratives & development. In the case of this specific project, this
approach has the potential to reduce hurdles and build better understanding of
how Locast could later be implemented for use with the community.

Conclusions

As evidenced by the student-authored project
testimonies contained within this paper, the educators teaching & research
strategy enabled students to set their own research and engagement agendas for
their group projects. This pedagogic approach resulted in some valuable and
even surprising findings:

Firstly, the educators’ emphasis upon the
students adopting self-directed, peer-led, co-creation-focused processes
empowered students to set their own research agendas. The students response to
this was to often adapt and reinterpret established research methods and tools
to suit their enquiries. One example of this is in the case of participant
observation — where students joined the public when sharing food or interacting
with the data gathering tools (at the My Park Day event between project phases
one and two as well as at other public events promoted by each team
individually). This helped to facilitate the public sharing more informal and
intimate knowledge.

Secondly, the range of playful data collection
tools (design probes designed and implemented by teams) used by the students meant
that the public were able to share their thoughts and have them captured in a
number of different ways. From a data analysis perspective, using triangulation
allowed for greater comparative analysis, thereby ensuring higher levels of
validity in their qualitative enquiries.

Thirdly, by asking students to provide
auto-ethnography of their research strategies and outcomes, they succeeded in
providing educators with pedagogically useful insights and feedback on their
teaching and research approach.

Fourthly, the educators decision to support
the development of the new generation of civically engaged researchers and
their pioneering new data collection tools enabled the students to create a
body of data that the educators could more objectively examine and critique.

Fifthly, Amplify Soundview revealed that the students were
inclined to self-select a combination of both digital and non-digital tools to
conduct their participatory enquiries. What this revealed is that Locast proved
most useful in the context of these projects is in its ability to offer a
digital presence for the non-digital, tactile elements of the students’
research — providing not only a useful early-researcher palimpsest for future
research, but a form of “presencing” for the community participants, who can
refer to the digital platform for evidence of (the recognized value of) their
own engagement in the enquiry. An analogous outcome is also valid for the
project partners Partnerships for Parks, who have gained insights of digital
mapping to inform future decision making.

Finally, by pushing Locast beyond its original capability as
a mapping tool towards an accessible data collation resource — a decision
largely led by the students and not the educators — community members could
access, use and event comment on content, thereby offering the students a vital
feedback loop on the efficacy of their research and crucially — the
representation of their data. Both educators and students were subsequently able
to critically examine the efficacy of Locast in attracting site hits indicative
of levels of community engagement in their online cultural asset.

Acknowledgments

Authors of Chapter Student
Narratives, Theme 01: Accessibility and
Mobility, written by Rashid Owoyele; Theme 02: Peer networks and
resources, written by James Clotfelter; Theme 03: Friends of Soundview,
written by Christopher Patten; Theme 04: The Waterfront , written by Emily
Santoro.

End Notes

[1] The 2009-2011 project Amplifying Creative Communities project by Parsons DESIS
Lab involved the following kinds of activities: (1) identification of local
assets and positive social innovation initiatives, data collection based on
ethnographic research; (2) production of films, or other image-based media with
the synthesis of research; (3) promotion of exhibitions, workshops and/or other
public events as a community engagement strategy to debate and advance local
social innovation; and (4) the development of toolkits through participatory
methods, aiming at facilitating social innovation initiatives.

[2]Action-Research defines a broad range of academic and non-academic
social science research practices, or rather a “family” of "forms of
inquiry which are participative, experiential and action oriented" (Reason & Bradbury, 2007, pp xxiii).

[3] In the end, the project selected for the phase 3 pilot was tested in a
different park (the East River Park, another waterfront park under the Catalyst
Program) and in partnership with the Grand Street Settlement (GSS), a historic,
Lower East Side-based social services provider.

[4] Friends of Soundview Park is a nascent voluntary community group that supports
the programming of the park. Partnerships for Parks aimed at leveraging this
existing initiative.

[5] This project was selected by Partnership for Parks for further development and
piloting in Spring 2013. The pilot ended up being developed in
a different park in Manhattan's Lower East Side and involved a community-based
organization (Grand Street Settlement) with approximately 150 young people in
summer programs. Results of this development are not included in this paper.

[6] These developments took place after the course was concluded in Spring 2013.
The butterfly garden was an idea emerged during the prototype potluck promoted
by the team “Taste of Soundview.” It has been implemented in 2014.

[7] Again, developments of this pilot are not described in this paper.

[8] Principles defining service design include the notion that whole experiences
can be designed, with users at the center of these experiences, who should
perceive them as a coherent whole even if it involves different touch-points,
and happen over time. (For more see Stickdorn
& Schneider, 2010).

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